Search form

You are here

Teaching Romanticism Blog

As a scholar and a teacher, I enjoy experimenting with both individual and collaborative projects. I tend to feel that the humanities are unique in their ambivalence about collaboration. On the one hand, the web is offering humanities scholars many opportunities for collaboration; on the other hand, I always find myself wondering how much a collaborative article, project, or book will "count" when it comes to hiring or tenure.

The topic is especially interesting for someone who teaches the Romantic period, since Romanticism is often associated with individualism. And yet, Romantic authors also expressed collectivist sentiments. As Beth Lau points out, even famously individualistic male Romantic writers struggled with individualism:

In a number of poems, Wordsworth describes his initial penchant for solitary nature worship giving way to love of other human beings. [...] Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the most powerful works ever written on the horrors of solitude and the problems inherent in overwheening individualism, and Shelley's Alastor is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of solopsism. John Keats increasingly wished to do 'some good in this world' instead of merely writing lush, escapist poetry. Even Byron, whose early poems featured such gloomy, misanthropic, solitary heroes as Childe Harold, the Giaour, and Manfred, ended his career with the comic satire Don Juan, which is very much concerned with people in society. (224)

I feel that a similar argument could be made about William Blake. While he frequently celebrated his individual vision and the originality of his work, Blake also stressed the importance of "self-annihilation," elaborating in his poem Milton that "We are not Individuals but States: Combinations of Individuals" (32.10; E131). And we must not forget the frequent, though often unmentioned, participation of Catherine Blake in the production of William Blake's illuminated books.

The problem with emphasizing collaboration and collectivity in Romantic courses is not only the historical association of Romanticism with individualism, but also the institutional makeup of the humanities. Most humanities courses still overwhelmingly favor individual success and failure. As David Parry recently noted on the blog AcademHack, collaborative projects are extremely difficult to assess but enormously important to teach. "I want to encourage and evaluate students for who they are," Parry explains, "but on the other hand I see as part of my job to teach students how to work in groups."

Parry's proposed solution to this delimma is to give each group the ability to fire one of their members. The rejected member is then required to complete the group assignment alone. While I feel that Parry's plan could work quite well for his course, I would like to move in a different direction that I feel is more conducive to the ambivalence many writers had with individualism during the Romantic period.

I'd like to use this blog to plan a course around digital culture and Romantic Individualism. My central focus in this course will be William Blake, since I am primarily interested in the artists and critics who have transmitted Blake's work from the Romantic period to the present and their impact on the image of Blake as an individualist writer. I would also like to use the course to experiment with collective subjectivities: in the content of the course, in the course's exploration of the William Blake's subjectivity, and in the makeup of the assignments and their assessment. Future posts will chart possible assignments, readings, ideas for discussion and class projects. I would also like to hear suggestions and criticisms from teachers, scholars, or anyone who visits this site. What are your thoughts about the usefulness of collaborative projects? Do you have any successes or failures to share?

Pedagogies Blog Categories:

Parent Section:

Parent Resource:

How to begin? According to scary statistics that are always quoted by my university’s Centre for Teaching, students are frighteningly quick to make up their minds about a course --and make their first impressions of the first quarter-hour of the first class bear heavy evidentiary weight. That is not the only reason to steer clear of the defeatism that Arthur Lovejoy models in one passage in his "The Discriminations of Romanticism" essay (1924): "When a man [sic!] is asked, as I have had the honor of being asked, to discuss Romanticism, it is impossible to know what ideas or tendencies, he is to talk about, when they are supposed to have flourished, or in whom they are supposed to be chiefly exemplified." Competing definitions of the “Romantic” are arcane material with which to begin the academic year, but doing a Lovejoy, so to speak, and throwing up our hands in despair isn’t an attractive option either. So we have to say *something* about why (as in my case this past week) the course we are embarking on is entitled, e.g. “Romantic Poetry and Prose.”

It is embarrassing to admit this--but it took me years of teaching before I began remembering in my inaugural comments to take into account what it is that "romantic" (in the lowercase) connotes in everyday contexts. It turns out, I’ve learned, that it's generally worth saying outright in the opening class that, whereas Romantic poetry and prose might include love poetry and love stories (though it doesn’t very often), it is not limited to love poetry and love stories. It’s also worth acknowledging how easy it is for this nomenclature for a literary period and/or movement to mislead (if not the students who’ve actually signed up for that class--no one in that group has ever actually admitted to me to ever having been misled-- then the “friends” or the “parents” who have taken an interest in their course selections). Even the Wikipedia entry on Romanticism doesn’t engage the relation between what is upper-case Romantic and what is lower-case romantic! Still, I think that acknowledgment can provide a really great starting off point for a course.

One way to begin might be with this wonderfully suggestive comment by Elizabeth Fay, introducing an edition of Romantic Circles: “Romantic poets, at least those of the canon, do not make love to women in their passionate pleas, but instead make love to nature and natural objects.” (Fay was introducing here a collection of essays that, as subsequent events showed, managed to put passion back on the scholarly agenda of Romanticists.) I’ve been taking a different tack lately and have often begun my Romantics courses by having the students think with me about how the Victorians’ retroactive identification of an earlier period as “Romantic” built upon the meanings that had previously been attached to “romance” in that prior era of romance revival. Keats’s apostrophizing of romance as “Queen of far away” in the sonnet on reading King Lear speaks volumes as well as speaking for and to volumes--and I’ve often made this little phrase serve as a kind of notional epigraph for the semester. Or there’s this fabulous moment from Wordsworth’s Prelude that I’m gearing up to discuss on Wednesday--introduced onto the syllabus as a bit of necessary leavening of our discussion of Burke, Paine, Wollstonecraft, and the Revolution Controversy:

O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a Country in Romance

This is a long way of directing the scary question with which I began at YOU. How do other teachers of the romantic-period survey BEGIN?

Pedagogies Blog Categories:

Parent Section:

Parent Resource:

This semester I’m teaching a course entitled, “Poetry, Art, and Science in the Age of Wonder” at Georgia Tech. At Tech, there’s no such thing as an English major, and so teaching a humanities course poses some unique challenges. How to make literature compelling for science and engineering majors is one of the questions I frequently ask myself when designing courses. Richard Holmes’s recent The Age of Wonder presented me with an excellent opportunity to combine my students’ interests with Romantic literature. So far this semester, we’ve been reading Holmes’s book and the experience has been, well, wonderful. The text has proven enticing for my students; it’s also a great example – as a notable and bestselling book – of the contemporary interest in and relevance of the Romantics.

One of the concerns I’ve had, however, is that the book is long and detailed, and we’ve spent a lot of time discussing Holmes but less time than I would like discussing Romantic poetry. I tried to rectify that this week by bringing to class a copy of William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned.” I handed out the poem after we had discussed Holmes’s chapter on “Dr. Frankenstein and the Soul.” This chapter, more than any of the others, considers why the Romantic poets have frequently been seen as anti-science. I felt that “The Tables Turned” would allow students to dig into those assumptions and see first-hand how complicated Wordsworth’s response to science was in the poem.

In discussion, students targeted the famous line, “We murder to dissect.” Students also started to ask questions, such as, “if the poem is so anti-science, why does Wordsworth use ‘we’ in that line? Shouldn't he say you?” Then students noticed the grouping of “science and art” in the last stanza, realizing quickly that much like science, poems also dissect objects of beauty for analysis in their own way. I was pleased with this discussion, but I also wanted to see how far we could take our analysis of the poem. I asked students to indulge in a creative thought experiment: if they could represent the poem as a work of visual art, any kind of work of art (a painting, a digital project, a comic book), how would they do so?

Students were quiet at first, but then they started to get excited. Really excited. I couldn’t keep up with the hands in the air. Lots of students proposed depicting a dreary lab with a window out on nature; others started to get more complex. One student said she imagined Wordsworth trapped in a bubble made out of math equations floating over a sublime landscape. As the students tossed ideas around about what the poem would look like, they engaged in compelling analyses of the poem: one student, for example, said he worried that representing the lab as dreary and nature as wonderful recreated a dichotomy between science and art that perhaps Wordsworth hadn’t quite meant to create; perhaps we could combine them by making the lab instruments double as natural objects. A tree could be a beaker, a leaf a sheet of lab notes.

All in all, it was a great discussion, and students got to get excited not only about the poem but about their creative capacity for analyzing and representing it. This kind of excitement is important in my course not least because throughout the semester, students are working in groups to develop technologically innovative online exhibitions of Romantic poetry, creating just the sorts of images they imagined in class this week. But I will save those details for another blog post. In the meantime, I’m wondering what other kinds of creative strategies folks have used to get students engaged in discussion, and I’m especially interested in considering the benefits (and perhaps also the drawbacks) of asking students to perform this kind of synaesthesiac experiment – would this experiment be possible to try with music, for example? Or film? Or other mediums?

Pedagogies Blog Categories:

Parent Section:

Parent Resource:

At Romantic Circles, we've spent the past year thinking about how we might rework the Pedagogies site into something that is really dynamic and usable. Phrases like "Web 2.0" "interactive classroom" or "digital literacy" get tossed around almost too frequently these days, but when discussing how best to reenvision Pedagogies, we found ourselves returning to the idea of the digital, interactive "Commons." As some of you might know, this is the name of the e-journal portion of the Pedagogies site, and we do have some great volumes of essays on specific pedagogical issues in the works. But what about an online common: people moseying through with (virtual) book-filled satchels, their minds meandering between research ideas and recent class discussions, briefly stopping to talk shop about a particular author, topic, or situation, feeling connected and maybe re-energized to return to all the work tasks a week encompasses.

Teaching Romanticism ("TR") was designed with the hopes that many of the brief discussions had on NASSR-l or at conference dinner tables would be granted a larger space and thoughtful audience through which to percolate. Often discussion of teaching methods, materials, or problems become opaque, abstract, or seem less pressing than other things on our plate, and so we temporarily put them at the bottom of our To Do list. As a still-newbie Professor at a liberal arts college (Mount Holyoke) with an intense student population (en masse all-night study session/sleepovers in the library--be there or be square!), I admittedly have a certain obligation to my teaching. Yet what happens when, even momentarily, we envision our praxis, our ideas, and our literary theories through the lens of pedagogy? Does pedagogy need to have a greater or different role in our thinking, and if so how?

Under the guidance of Deidre Lynch, we have assembled a handful of scholars with a variety of interests, prerogatives, and experience. We hope you'll all pop-in occasionally with a comment or question. Or just lurk through some of the discussions. With the help of our bloggers, maybe making it through the semester will become a little easier if not virtually enjoyable.